1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a method and apparatus for generating an optical pulse train formed of evenly spaced pulses of multiple wavelengths using a technique referred to as time-lens compression. In addition, the invention relates to an aberration correction technique, based on the temporal analog of a spatial correction lens, to improve the quality of the compressed pulses.
2. Description of the Background Art
Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) parallel processing has shown great promise for ultrafast real-time sampling. However, the complexity of the sampling source, which requires a linear time-to-wavelength mapping, hampers its practical implementation. Previous approaches to obtain such a “linearly chirped” multi-wavelength source, i.e. a source that generates a periodically repeating multi-wavelength pulse train with very precise interpulse spacing, relied on complex femtosecond modelocked lasers to provide the necessary spectral bandwidth and required spectral slicing, spectral flattening and adjustable time delay.